Having covered my fair share of council planning committee meetings over the years, I’ve always felt a smidgen of sympathy for those elected officials tasked with deciding on the fate of applications both large and small. How do you adequately balance the opinions and needs of both the wider community and those more immediately affected by your decision for or against? Councillors are often damned if they wave plans through, and damned if they don’t. This difficulty in balancing often diametrically opposed viewpoints came to mind in reading our report today concerning a retrospective planning …
